Living with post traumatic stress disorder means experiencing a great deal of suffering. If you have been through a highly stressful experience and are wondering if you may have PTSD, it is important to be assessed and explore treatment options.

The socially conditioned responses to a person who has experienced a trauma are sometimes unhelpful because PTSD symptoms are maintained through avoidance, which blocks processing, and it is natural for people in your life who care about you to try to help you put difficult experiences out of mind. Once avoidance has become a habit and processing has gotten "stuck",  the symptoms of PTSD can continue for a long time. Coping with these symptoms (e.g. irritability, feeling disconnected, nightmares, avoiding certain places or situations, blaming yourself for what happened) is exhausting. Sometimes, the symptoms of trauma can almost seem like they have become part of who you are because they are present so often and may have started a long time ago. It can be hard to imagine that things could change for you. But there are several ways to address trauma in therapy, and many of these approaches have strong evidence supporting their efficacy.

Though there is no therapy that is 100% effective for everyone, some have been shown to be much more effective than others in general. These include Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and Prolonged Exposure (PE). I offer CPT and EMDR. I am not trained in PE.

It can be helpful also to integrate expressive arts therapy and somatic psychotherapy work with trauma treatment.

If you have become curious about trauma therapy because you recognize your experience in descriptions of PTSD even though you don't believe you have had a traumatic experience, we can explore that together.